2001-2010

An ageing swimming champion falls for a failed writer after answering an unusual personal ad in director Rudolf Thome’s existential love story. Impulsively responding to an ad placed by an awkward young writer Johannes, middle-aged Johanna Perl falls hopelessly in love. On the surface Johannes is a balding failure, but Johanna sees something in her new lover that inspires her like never before. Soon enough, the unlikely new couple decides to move in together, and even Johanna’s daughter Sophia finds romance with a handsome new beau. While all is well at first, the blissful new living arrangement is soon shattered when Johannes pens a best seller and begins sleeping with his publicist, leaving his older lover to wonder if she has finally lost her mind. …You Told Me, You Love Me ( Du hast gesagt, dass Du mich liebst ).Read More »

Hawaii, Oslo is the story of a handful of people who cross each other’s path without necessarily knowing each other, during the hottest day of the year, in Oslo. We follow Frode and Milla. They are having their first child, who they are told will not live long. We follow Bobbie-Pop, a faded singer who tries to commit suicide. We follow Leon, an institutionalized kleptomaniac who is loking for Åsa, to whom he has a ten year old deal to get married. We meet Leon’s brother, Trygve, who fetches Leon at the institution to celebrate his birthday, but who himself has plans to use his leave from prison to run away. And most of all we meet the angel Vidar, Leon’s best buddy at the institution, who sees things no one else can see, and who may be able to save everyone – except himself?Read More »

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Nocturnes pour le roi de Rome is a French film directed in 2005 by Jean-Charles Fitoussi in Rome during the Pocket Film Festival and released on January 6, 2010. This film is the first feature film to have been shot with a cell phone equipped with a camera.

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An old German composer is invited in Roma by the King to compose for him eight Notturni. But the memories of tragic events he used to live there, in the very place he is now coming back, make him unable to write anything.Read More »

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In an impressive follow up to his debut film Forest, Benedek Fliegauf tells the uncompromising story of a day in the life of a drug dealer. His clients include the leader of a religious sect, a friend who needs a final fix, a former lover who has had his child, a student, and a black marketeer. Fliegauf’s film recreates life in a city that resembles a ghost town, an alienated world with its own priorities and realities. It is, he says ‘. an imaginary city with a strongly spiritualist atmosphere. This necropolis is the film’s real protagonist’. His subject is depression (‘a state of consciousness that saturates the life of .too many of us’) and the film provides a deeply felt testament to the realities of a painful and still little understood world. An admirer of Béla Tarr, Fliegauf similarly allows his characters to exist in extended (or real) time, with a minimalist style in which every sound or line of dialogue becomes privileged. The framing, camera movement, and sound design combine to create hypnotic film-making of a high order. It is a demanding and essential film and no mere exercise in miserabilism.Read More »

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A sensitive portrait of Sabine Bonnaire, the autistic sister of the french actress Sandrine Bonnaire.Read More »

Synopsis (EN) : Laurent comes to visit his father not far from Bethune. But his father, who lives a hermit’s life deep in the woods, has only one thing on his mind: to do away with his six children in order to relieve them of the miseries of life. Welcomed at the Caboche farm where his brother Frederic works (Frederic advises him not to try to see their father), Laurent is delighted to see hardy 81 year old Alfred again. The gods are not far off, and, despite all, the pleasures of existence too.Read More »

The famous Dutch singer Dries Roelvink is abducted after a gig in a local discotheque. He ends up in a mobile home right in the middle of nowhere amongst two of his biggest “fans”: Freek and Teuntje. They are a friendly but unattractive couple who are missing one major thing in their lonely lives: a child of their own. But regrettably, they both can’t have any children. Meanwhile Freek and Teuntje are trying to let their Idol feel comfortable in their mobile home and gradually it becomes clear to him why he has been taken there.Read More »

The censured novel Conversazione in Sicilia, by Elio Vittorini, published in four episodes in 1918/1939, is the basis for this account of a man returning to Sicily for a visit to his mother. This is a journey of initiation, “a voyage in fourth dimension through his infancy”, he says. Not only to re-live words, people, places, sounds, sensation, and odor of his seven years, but mainly to understand himself. He re-encounters his mother whom he has not seen for 15 years, ever since she left for the North of Italy. Through her, he attempts to glean answers to questions and facts that still trouble his memories, such as the image of his dead father. In this return, he also comes face to face with reality, corruption, and treachery, that differ from his memories as a child with a mother, lost between abstract fury and an awareness of his incapacity to comprehend the human condition.Read More »

A man volunteers to take part in an experiment that attempts to analyse human behaviour under extreme conditions of terror. His mission is to remain seated inside a dark room for a length of time of 15 minutes. If he manages to hold on, he will receive in return a generous sum of money. Is it possible to terrify an individual who knows beforehand that everything is a farce?Read More »